Life could have turned out very differently for Amanda Staveley. At the start of the decade she met the Duke of York and the pair began a relationship. She was said to have turned down a marriage proposal in 2003, reports she has never denied.

The relationship ended, although they remain friends, and she turned her back on a life that would probably have brought overbearing media scrutiny. Staveley, who had modelled part-time to help pay her way through Cambridge, would have been a paparazzi favourite.

Instead she built her financial advisory firm, PCP Capital Partners, gathering a small team of advisers including David Mellor, the former government minister, and erstwhile Warburgs director Robin Binks, along the way.

Now she is back in the press, but this time it is on the business pages.

Staveley has emerged as one of the key players in a deal that saw billions of pounds of Middle Eastern money pumped into Barclays. A picture of her looking self-composed in an elegant blue suit and clutching documents as she entered offices for a final round of negotiations was widely distributed by her public relations team.

Staveley, who brokered the deal for a member of the royal family in Abu Dhabi in a matter of weeks, collected £40m for her firm, a fee paid by Barclays and most of which reportedly she will keep herself. She celebrated the deal with a night out at Annabel's, the Mayfair club where Sarah Ferguson had her hen night.

It was the second significant deal the 35-year-old has been involved with in a matter of weeks, following the takeover of Manchester City football club by the same member of the Abu Dhabi clan, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan. That deal was reported to have earned Staveley £10m.

She appears to have played a smart game, cultivating contacts in Middle Eastern states awash with petro-dollars. The royal families are some of the only investors willing to do deals and diversify amid the credit crunch.

She is acting for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, of Dubai, who still hopes to buy Liverpool FC and would put her on the board. She is also fronting a £1bn deal for the Qatar Investment Authority to buy the Trillium facilities management business from the property group Land Securities.

Staveley, who is single, has a home in Mayfair but spends most of her time in Dubai. In an interview this week she insisted that she did not work just for the cash. "It is not about money - it wouldn't matter if I was making £8m or £200m," she said, an odd comment that would appear to suggest £8m is peanuts. "I just want to go to bed at night and say I've done a good job."

The daughter of a wealthy landowner in Yorkshire, whose estate had come into the hands of ancestors as a gift from Cardinal Wolsey, Staveley has a fondness for horses and she impressed as a sportswoman before snapping her achilles tendon. The Telegraph described her as "brilliant", "stunningly beautiful" and "alluring", and spoke of her "fairytale" life. But those who have known her insist she is far more down to earth than her background might suggest.

Mark Horrocks, a hedge fund manager and former boyfriend, said, referring to the Middle Eastern rulers: "Her own family has a reasonably good standing, so she is accepted by these people.".

She is a true Yorkshire person, he adds, a very straight speaker. "She is just a hard worker, completely focused on what she is doing."

Staveley made Middle East contacts in her early 20s when she persuaded a bank manager to lend her £180,000 to buy a restaurant called Stocks, between Cambridge and Newmarket racecourse, despite having no experience in the industry. The restaurant was a haunt for horse owners, including Dubai's rulers, the Maktoums, and that is how she got to know the family.

She went on to build contacts across the region overseas, even dealing with Colonel Gadafy in Libya. "It does take a long while to gain the trust of these families but once you have it, it is total," said an executive, who has worked with her. "I don't think there is a ruler in the Middle East that doesn't know her. She is very warm and friendly and has to put up with this 'pretty blonde' stuff, but she is realistic about it."

It hasn't been all plain sailing. She set up a conference centre on the Cambridge Science Park, selling it to EuroTelecom, which subsequently crashed, burning through £17m of investors' money. She was on the brink of bankruptcy four years ago, and is working through the final stages of an individual voluntary arrangement. One of her creditors, curiously, is Barclays.

The CV

Born April 11 1973 in Doncaster.

Education Queen Margaret's, York. Studied modern languages at Cambridge University, but left before completing her degree.

Career: Worked as a model while a student. After Cambridge she set up a restaurant, Stocks, in Cambridgeshire. Here she built connections with wealthy Middle Eastern families. She began investing in start-up companies and set up a conference centre and restaurant business, Q.Ton, at Cambridge Science Park. She is a partner in PCP Gulf Partners, a role that saw her negotiate Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan's £3.5bn investment in Barclays and his takeover of Manchester City.